Rambling around Leith today taking snaps. The port district is ugly but it has character. I would wager it has the highest concentration of junkies and creatives per square mile than anywhere else in Scotland. Everyone knows someone who’s on the smack, yet conversely their next-door neighbour will have aspirations of being this generation’s Bukowski.
The pubs also ‘suffer’ from deflation.
A snippet from Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967) came to Gorgie today. An eerie stillness, a surreal chav-free mise en scène. And one car was blasting out ‘The Boys of Summer’.
Traffic jams aren’t always rotten.
Sliema was a cracking wee jaunt – booze, sun, pigeons. My personal highlight, though, was a troupe of clueless Yanks asking the bus driver for directions to a “fish market”. The bloke behind the wheel took off his sunglasses, looked the ringleader of the muppets up and down, and retorted “Nah” before closing the bus doors.
Epic.
A shitty wee movie I have made. Uploading the beast took longer than making the actual thing (seven hours of shooting). The sound ‘design’ is fucking awful, but some of the visuals look decent.
Lindesnes, Norway. A meal at ‘Under’ can cost up to £350, this Europe’s first underwater munch den with 100 seats available for diners. Food has never interested me much (unless I’m pished and craving kebabs) save the architectural design of eateries; I suppose the idea behind this venue is that it’s an ‘experience’. The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) comes to mind, the only decent Roger Moore number in the Bond canon. Though the restaurant is only five metres under the sea, it’s a step in the right direction, the ultimate aim a Pot Noodle in the wreck of the Titanic.
Further reading:
https://www.dw.com/en/worlds-largest-underwater-restaurant-opens-in-norway/a-48002099
Ventured into some vinyl shop on Cockburn Street, Edinburgh the other day. I wished to recreate the truly gnarly album cover of DJ Shadow’s truly spellbinding Entroducing (1996).
Entroducing (1996).
I was loitering around the venue for a good 25 minutes, the owner becoming visibly vexed with yours truly. He didn’t like the cut of one’s jib, nor the fact I was papping his customers.
I managed to get a half-decent snap out of the 1,835 taken, and this was of some random not even in the fucking shop.
I’ll see you in another life when we are both cats.
Bend, Oregon, houses the last remaining Blockbuster, defeated foe of Amazon and Netflix.
I can see this store becoming a sort of movie Mecca of the future, nostalgia in the present. And there should be just one of them, perhaps the only reason to ever visit Oregon. When Blockbuster ‘died’ I confess I wasn’t bothered. It’s only a few years down the line that you come to lament the absence of such treats.
Blockbuster was ‘da bomb’ back in the day, the Friday night Shangri-La – purveyor of movies and nibbles after a week of school tedium. Granted, there was an annoying element to proceedings, this the desk clerk who, when he didn’t believe he was Auld Reekie’s version of Quentin Tarantino, went into full SS Guard-mode if you didn’t rewind a VHS rental of Rush Hour (1998). It was for the most part a haven, though, and coupled with Edinburgh’s car boot sales a perfect introduction to film.
The internet is of course sublime (you don’t even have to leave the house and speak to anyone) but Blockbuster was where geeks congregated, our own wee social and cinema club. My old beloved Blockbuster in Gorgie has tragically metamorphosed into a Costa Coffee frequented by polo-necked creatures. Gentrification and all that.
Gorgie Road’s Blockbuster, now a hipster hangout.
Further reading:
https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/oregon-will-have-the-last-blockbuster-on-earth-/4836210.html
https://www.pressherald.com/2019/03/18/this-is-what-its-like-inside-the-last-blockbuster-on-earth/
MH370 is the 2010s very own version of Amelia Earhart, and we may never definitively know what happened; even if the black box somehow washes up on a Tom-Hanks-and-Wilson island, it’ll be beyond repair given the more than five years of aimless swimming.
Its disappearance has irrevocably changed aviation, though.
The FAA has mandated that by 2020 all commercial aircraft are to be equipped with transponders having ADS-B out capability, meaning the plane’s location can be detected in real time.
The Global Aeronautical Distress and Safety System (GADSS) will from January 2021 ensure that airlines report all of their planes positions every 15 minutes. In addition, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) mandated that on aircraft built from 2022, those flights in distress will have to report their position to air traffic control every minute, and that all underwater locator beacons last 90 days instead of 30.
A further change initiated by the ICAO is the requirement that planes made from 2021 include 25-hour voice recorders so there will be a record not only of the flight but the cockpit preparations.
What one can’t account for is human error and, though a very infrequent event, the mental instability and criminal intent of the pilots. That’s the elephant on the plane; some folk are just nutters undetected by background and periodic checks (if any). In the wake of the Germanwings Flight 9525 crash in 2015, someone suggested to me there should be a system in place for a team of controllers on the ground to remotely override the pilot’s commands were he to go loco. It’s something to think about, however outlandish.
Further reading:
What is it about the Evil Empire and their ugly-as-fuck brutalist buildings? A legacy imbued with obsessions of ‘social realism’ shows scant regard for anything ‘real’ about its constructs; concrete eyesores sticking out like sore thumbs, their centrepiece buildings merely highlight the lunacy of the ideology running the system.
In the Kaliningrad enclave, we have this anomaly plonked there, a robot geezer built beside the rubble of Königsberg Castle. It speaks to the USSR’s fixation with technology and its precedence over the human element. A central administration building, its interior was never finished and the project ran out of cash. It did, however, receive a paint job in 2005.
Nuts.
Further reading:
https://failedarchitecture.com/the-rebuilding-of-a-hornets-nest/
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 